Link, Align and Leverage

What do you do when you care passionately about an issue? In the past, the answer was start a nonprofit. Today, the answer is find out what it already going on, see how you can help, and only if there is a gap start something new. Scarcity led to the creation of many nonprofits. Many nonprofits has led to scarcity of charitable and philanthropic dollars. What are we doing about it? Learning, linking, aligning and ultimately leveraging the assets we already have make sure we can engage the talent we need to achieve real impact—transformational change. I added learning because unless we take the time to learn and reflect, we may be inadvertently treating a symptom allowing the real problem to continue to fester underneath increasing the numbers in need and the condition to deteriorate.

A number of the core stewardship initiatives of the Fresno Business Council will involve the nonprofits as execution partners. For example, Artie Padilla from Every Neighborhood Partnership is the execution partner for our kindergarten readiness pilot. Luis Santana from Reading and Beyond is the execution partner for The Bridge Academy. They were selected as “vendors” as they have the earned the trust of the people we seek to reach, the program fits within their wheelhouse, and they hold themselves accountable for results. Because both pilots were designed with scale in mind, they were crafted at the strategic transformational level (the Fourth Sphere) rather than the tactical level where typically only symptoms can be addressed.